Business-to-Business Internet Marketing, Fourth Edition - Lifecycle ...

338 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING
One of the strengths of Internet marketing will be its ability to facilitate
prospect and customer cultivation. As e-mail becomes an accepted
means of marketing communication to reach qualified prospects
and customers, you will be able to use it as a promotional vehicle to
update key constituents on a periodic basis. The e-mail newsletter is
gaining wide acceptance as a format, as both customers and qualified
prospects elect to subscribe to such publications. E-fulfillment is likely
to become more popular as well, as the demand for electronically disseminated
information increases. This will be a boon to b-to-b marketers,
who will be able to substantially reduce the costs of traditional
fulfillment and fulfill information requests ever more rapidly.
Areas of Web sites are increasingly dedicated to customers, and
extranets have evolved into customer and key prospect information and
service centers. Web-based communications, in the form of Web sites
that customers and prospects visit or Web pages that are pushed to
customer and prospect desktops, are commonplace.
You can see the implications of Internet marketing just by noting
how it pervades every step of the lead generation and qualification process.
At this point, the Internet components do not replace other media—all
media work together in a closely coordinated effort, supporting
one another. Prospects need to be able to choose the way they wish to
respond and receive information. This is a key concept, because it will
define the future of marketing communications:
Prospects and customers will define the way you, the marketer,
communicate with them. They will drive the communication
process instead of the marketer.
This fundamentally changes the relationship with a marketer’s constituency
forever. With the empowerment of the customer and prospect,
and the rise of true permission marketing, the marketer’s role will be to
deliver what the customer or prospect asks for, when it is asked for,
using the delivery channel of the individual’s choice. With the emergence
of one-to-one customer relationships, the b-to-b marketer will
need to learn from customer interactions and use that data to continuously
refine the customer-marketing program.
This is only the beginning. At its current rate of adoption, Internet
marketing is no longer an option but a necessity. With its true costsaving
and time-saving benefits, as well as the growing demand for elec-